The State of CA State Parks

State parks will stay open for at least 2 years

"SACRAMENTO Gov. Jerry Brown announced Tuesday that he had signed several bills to keep California's state parks open and ensure greater spending oversight after a scandal in which parks officials hid $54 million."

In a recent newsletter California State Parks Foundation President Elizabeth Goldstein appealed to its 130,000 constituents:  "…lawmakers have introduced Assembly Bill (AB) 1478 which will appropriate $20.5 million in State Park and Recreation Fund funding to keep parks open. In addition to allocating this funding, AB 1478 also includes several other important provisions.

• Prohibits the California Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) from closing or proposing the closure of a state park in the 2012-13 and 2013-14 fiscal years.
• Strengthens the State Park and Recreation Commission to improve their ability and capacity to provide oversight and a more meaningful connection between the public, park stakeholders, and the parks department.
• Provides a one-time appropriation to ensure that all ongoing internal and external investigations into the DPR are fully funded.

Send a Message to Your legislators now.

In a follow up press release, Elizabeth Goldstein wrote:

“Governor Brown made the first important step toward restoring public confidence in California’s state parks by signing AB 1478,” said CSPF President Elizabeth Goldstein. “Putting this bill into law is a sign of good faith on the part of California’s government that all the hard work of communities, organizations and donors across the state who stepped up to support their parks is recognized and appreciated. —CSPF

Now I usually don't blog about news headlines, let alone bulk email newsletters, but so much confusion has risen around the California State Parks scandal—I decided to look into it to see if I could make some sense of it. It's a case of defending what's mine—to use the California State Parks Foundation slogan.

What I do know is that most of the 70 California State Park park closures are located in the Greater Bay Area. And for some reason many people are blaming Governor Jerry Brown for the closures instead of the politicians who created the problem. Inheritance.

My childhood state park, Camp Taylor was one of the 70 parks slated to be closed—as in boarded up, gates locked—along with Tomales Bay as there weren't enough state funds to keep them open. We grew up on the slopes of Mt. Barnabe, swam each summer in Papermill Creek, and gathered huckleberries each fall on Tomales Ridge. My natal stomping grounds. This was becoming personal.

Add to that list of slated September closures:  Marin's China Camp, Benicia State Recreation Area, Mariposa's California Mining and Mineral Museum, San Mateo's Gray Whale Cove State Beach, Providence Mountains State Recreation Area (already shuttered) and Monterey's Zmudowski State Beach.

Most of my favorite Santa Cruz beaches have also been laid out on that September chopping block. Even the fabled Antelope Valley in SoCal—some 25 parks in all—better than the original 70 parks slated to close last year, that's nearly one-fourth of all our state parks. Sonoma's Goat Rock, and Rancho Olompali, the gates are already locked.

Goat Rock had locked gates, September 2011, as did most coastal beaches from Sonoma to Mendocino and Del Norte.

There was a $22m shortfall in the California State Parks budget. Private funders have stepped forward to keep several more popular parks including Henry Coe and Mugo Point open.

Rancho O;ompali (old Martin Ranch, aka Grateful Dead commune), on the slopes of Mt. Burdell—closed

Many California state parks have already transferring operating costs to private and public partners. Other partner takeovers, including one plan for a local favorite of mine, Austin Creek State Recreation Area in Guerneville, are pending.

Whereas this public and private partner solution keeps our state parks open in the short term—what implications does it have two years or ten years from now? Does this mean our state parks are now in the hands of private concessions? With no control factors in place?

"I think it's a lost opportunity to take action to reclaim our parks before it's too late. I worry that once they're lost, they may be lost forever," said Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto. "It's very hard to reclaim a resource like this once you've let it go." —Huff Post

Meanwhile rogue Parks and Recreation bureaucrats (whose appointments date back to the Pete Wilson administration) were sitting on two huge slushpots of unaccounted for surplus money ($54m) that chould have been used to keeping California State Parks open.

It's unclear how much of the money is dedicated for specific purposes or can be used generally on things such as staff salaries or to keep parks open.  —HuffPost

BTW, that surplus wasn't in the California State Parks' own budget but in other Parks and Recreation departments' budgets. Lest you think it's a recent development, that $54 million surplus has been accruing interest for more than a decade.

Rogue's Gallely: The Parks and Recreation Fund squirreled away $20.3 million while the Off Highway Vehicle Fund hid another $33.5 million. Neither of these vast sums was reported to California's state controller. Seems like more than an oversight.

Apparently the agencies did such a good job hiding the slush fund that Ruth Coleman, the California Parks Department director, who was hired during Pete Wilson's tenure, and has led the agency since 2003, hadn't a clue. She took the fall and unfortunately the name of California State Parks was sullied during the scandal.

Understand that California State Parks had nothing to do with this fiasco. But it certainly has had a negative impact on legislative attempts to secure long-term public funding for California State Parks at the ballot box. I happily would've paid a higher vehicle tax on two cars if it meant I had an access pass to California State Parks. How cool is that?

California voters in November 2010 rejected Proposition 21, an $18 registration fee for vehicles that would have raised an estimated $500 million for state parks. —HuffPost

I'm fairly certain that the Off Highway Vehicle Fund deliberately hid their excess funds. Before the scandal broke, I remember reading a small article stating that they jealously didn't want to "share" their take. Parks & Rec could also have hidden their surplus for similar reasons—neither wanting to bail out the beleaguered California State Parks. Call it petty sibling rivalry taken to the extreme.

Good old Arnie squandered CA's surplus budget and put California into a $15.7 billion deficit. But he had no idea that the umbrella oprganization, California State Parks and Recreation, was sitting on a surplus—or I'm sure he would've spent that windfall too. 

But the actual deceit goes back much farther, at least to Wilson's time. So credit Pete Wilson with this mess, perhaps even Gray Davis—but not Jerry Brown. Let's hope that our newly appointed nine-member State Park and Recreation Commission are better stewards than the last lot.

Wáng Wéi translations BIRDS

Myriad Birds Calling in the Ravine
—Interlinear translation of Wáng Wéi's Niāo Míng Jiàn

I am lost amid the falling petals of the cassia tree
calm spring night in the deserted hills
rising moon startles the mountain birds
birds singing forever deep in the ravine.

—2nd translation
Lulled by a sweet drift of cassia petals
night nestles on the empty ridges
moonrise startles the mountain birds
a cascade of birdsong floods the steep ravine.

Water Ousels in the Gorge
—after Wáng Wéi's Niāo Míng Jiàn
(freewrite transliteration)

They hide between shining trees
A stone hut in the distance
A woman's thoughts like the moon
trapped in the pines
Windows, so like the sun, or eyes
Clouds upon clouds, mountains
and the moon, hidden in the mist
Ousels skim across reflected light
the river mouth singing.


Poetry Inside Out workshop
Niǎo Míng Jiàn
Wáng Wéi 699-759

Rén xián guìhuā luò,
Yèjìng chūnshān kōng.
Yuèchū jīng shān niǎo,
Shí míng chūn jiàn zhōng.

To see the Chinese Mountain Song

Mac Hell and the realm of Lost Permissions

Hell and damnation. Hell and damnation and back again. The Snow Leopard Update I ran on my "new" MacBookPro stalled, via the iCloud, but due to slow DSL, it also locked all my external volumes to "custom access" and now I can't access ANY of my backup hard drive files under Info/Unlock. Not exactly progress.

Some Terminal codes I get are: drw-rw-r-T and an uchg flag. Anyone know Terminal, or UNIX? 

Someone asks: Can't Disk Utility's "Repair Permissions" come to the rescue? Restoring permissions—and there were lots of them—did not help. No reboot success. No, that's system file permissions. This is much deeper—at the UNIX root level. Ironically Disk Utility is what got me into this mess to begin with—I couldn't fix all the file permissions so I got the bright idea to reinstall Leopard, and do something about it. Mistake. 

FIrst round loading Snow Leopard from Leopard was OK— then when I ran the Combo update to 6,8, all manner of hell broke loose. My MacBookPro is an inert nert—it's stuck at the gray Apple logo. It's hanging. And nothing will unstick it, not even rebooting in Safe Mode. Oh, and it has no working screen. The inverter's gone.

My little MacBook 1.1 (2006!) trumpeting like a baby dino, came to the rescue. It accidentally loaded Snow Leopard, so I went with it. Been trying to update that little MacBook for ages—to no avail. So now it decides it's a good time to load Snow Leopard. WTF?

MackBook, why couldn't you have done that years ago when Snow Leopard first came out? I would have loved you longer. Why upgrade now, when you've been kicked to the obsolete technology closet?

OK, not kicking gift horses in the teeth. Niiiice MackBookie. Goood MackBookie. I have a working computer. I can access the internet.

Snow Leopard Update locked all my external hard drives. Not what I was expecting. Clearly the past does not want to let go and I'm dealing with a couple of jealous cats hissing and getting all turfy on me. If I can get that poor stuck drive to load—I might have better luck unraveling the dilemma.

I ran Terminal and discovered the uchg flag, AKA user immutable flags. What? Sounds so mysterious. Piet Bess says this is a "sticky bit" issue. Do some research about clearing the sticky bit. sudo chmod 775. Awp. It's all Greek to me. I don't DO Terminal!  OK, well....

I learned that the "uchg" part means it is locked. It also a symbol for barfing. Under Info, the "Locked" check box is not an option. Nor are the permissions wheels available. Accessing my files in a read-only mode is not an option. That padlock and "custom" access means I can't even OPEN them because I don't have sufficient "privileges."

I found this: Under Terminal, type:

• cd /Volumes
• chflags -R nouchg Portable\ HD
• The command will perform an unlock on the HD and recursively unlock every file and folder on the drive.

Too sticky a wicket for me. So I reached out to my favorite Mac Guru. MacWorld maven Chris Breen said to use Batchmod. Voila! Magic ensued. Permissions restored. One. By. One. Slow progress. But I was kissing Chris's proverbial feet. I had a way in.

I may have accidentally changed the permissions on a 3rd party app that shouldn't have been locked. I hit return without thinking, and it "unlocked" all my Apps files—or so it said. Wonder if that's the root source of the cascade? At least all 3 HDDS have the same warning codes...

Meanwhile I have a poetry reading Sept 29, Watershed Poetry Festival & 100 Thousand Poets for Change— and I can't get into my hard drives in order to retrieve poems!!!! Luckily I have hard copies of many poems, and they're also posted on my blog. Will have to make do. We've a reading on Friday 28th, at Berkeley High School too.

9/26 Today, I had a modicum of success. But I still need my files on the desktop. I had one working OS system loaded onto a USB drive—it took three ports to find the right combo. Running the OS from the USB drive, I was able to rescue my desktop files. 

This means I can also clone a drive and pop it in—but I'd rather get the original drive working. It needed to authenticate all files when I tried to move them—so permissions are whacked—probably the source of the locked external drives. 

Robert Peake asks: Are you still under AppleCare? A nice genius could probably sort this out for you pretty quick... I had to laugh. At this point I was in so deep, I probably knew more than the Apple Genii. Are you kidding—these Mackies are older than durt! 2006. Made about the time some of the Apple techs were born.

This is the part where I used one elderly MacBook, long in tooth, to fix a fancyass MacBook Pro. I won't mention that I used my MacBook's old Tiger drive to unravel this dilemma, I had updated the MacBook to a SSD drive. I don't worry about MacBook's older 32-bit addressing vs the MBP's superior 64-bit addressing conflict. I swap drives. It works. But I still needed my desktop files. Not a hardware problem. MBP works. Unswap drives. Progress.

I eventually bought a new hard drive, swapped them out, then cleaned and cloned everything, and was up and running, but it took days of diligence, and stealing wifi that was faster than ours, so I could access the updates. 

Batchmod's logo is a bat. I had bats in the bellfry and bells in hell were ringing off the hook. It was a slow roast, but Batchmod saved the day. Albeit slowly. Can't recommend it enough.

I discovered my old Word 5 files turned into rogue Unix files when I joined this decade's operating system, but that's another story.

Moral of the story, reloading a tried and true operating systems does not necessarily guarantee smooth sailing. And Never NEVER never never have any hard drives attached when updating software. Especially your backup hard drive, and its backup hard drive. I could've lost everything. And I do mean everything. 

The USS Endeavor

I saw the Endeavor fly over Oakland enroute to SF, right outside my front door with Lorenzo the mailman. Rockin! We saw, we screamed, we clicked pix, and high-fived each other! Much more exciting than I anticipated—seeing as earlier I had been driving all around town for an hour looking for it. I gave it up for lost. And went home. Sigh.

But as I turned to go inside, there it was, low between the trees, flying piggyback on a 747 right up Highway 580. Flying in slo-mo. Egad, I took three out-of-focus pix, two passable fuzzy ones, and a crisp in-focus photo of the sidewalk and my foot. I thought my mother would've laughed at the folly of it. Then I remembered it was her birthday.

I never expected to be that excited. Like I was a kid. Absolutely thrilling. I did not go gentle... I'm hoarse from whooping and screaming.

I never expected so many emotions all at once. I was sort of ho-hum about it all  until I saw it—then I realized anything was possible—even the stars. 


GLIMPSING THE STARS

While they unwrapped their new iPhone cameras,
my eyes wrapped themselves around an image
of the Endeavor silhouetted against the sun.
And for a moment, I saw the countenance of hope.

Then I realized anything was possible—even the stars.

GLIMPSING THE STARS

GLIMPSING THE STARS 

While they unwrapped their new iPhone cameras, 

my eyes wrapped themselves around an image 
of the Endeavor silhouetted against the sun.
And for a moment, I saw the countenance of hope.

Then I realized anything was possible—even the stars. 

9/22/2012

Feeding the soul

Cesar Chavez I said I feed at the body and poets feed the spirit. Sometimes the body, and darkness, turns towards the dawn stretched on the island. The perfection of angels, paper planes wrestling with the wind, a tattoo of rain. The hot and bothered sun floats in a mechanical sky of heated beauty, calling at smog, calling at graffiti. Drunken stars rise in the mist. Like bullets they pierce the night. No wings in the barrios. Sunrise. 

Make a list of body parts, to save the prisoner, think of water torture. It’s impossible to say, turning 50. There’s only time for a short kiss. Then it’s time to go home and rinse off the soul. We are all living on stolen land, said Ishmael Reed, Oakland‘s original son. Merritt hated writers he called them scribblers. Do you want to rename the lake Peralta? The local historians remember Kit Carson, but we remember you. The teeth of mountains ground down by the four winds. To be tribe is to be without property. How to hold the two thoughts in your head without it exploding, knowing that on the other side, we mark our time with their time.

2012

EPISTOLARY WRITING with Camille Dungy

Dear Ethyl,

Please don't go down
to the bridge
for it will make no difference
in the end
War is inevitable
an espionage against life
and the martyrs always
fall for all the old stories
I love you too much
to lose you again
Not like that
For if you go down to the bridge tonight
Then I too must go with you
Please don't go down
to the Delgado Bridge tonight
For surely I must accompany you
as your loving husband
I rremain faithful to the cause
but I love you more than life itself
so I will go with you
down to the bridge

Your Ira

LETTER TO MY SULLIED ART

Because my art is suffering
offering service to the void
the unborn legacy of words
awaiting birth, or rebirth
because nothing is new
we are continually reinventing ourselves
passing it forward
I want to tell you
about the way the eye sees
a certain angle of light
the way the shadows ease their grief
across the web of the labyrinth
hunting loose aspects of crystal
trapped within stone
Name it, call it feldspar and citrine
garnet and quarttz, serpentine and blueschist
But the deer ignore the pattern of the labyrinth
daintily picking their way across stones
At the crest of the hill
where buckeye and oak meet the eons
a horse's mane of clouds
shrouds the sky—whether in grief or as a bride
And so I write to fill the void
and settle into an easy chair
in the corner of a dream
These words, a gift,
a lone hawk keening in the wind
What was it Picasso said? A lie? Truth? 

Yours,
Maureen

BODICE RIPPER
—after Ezra Pound's The River Merchant's Wife

She married too young
but he was a great lord
who said absence
made the heart stronger
but the insecurities
One never comes back
Did the river take him?
So many undercurrents
written into the river
He loved her
passing of time
They were paired butterflies.
She thought him dead,
never coming back
It was a great leveler
of circumstances, the turning tide,
not translated, nor translatable.
She could never send that letter
into the void, let the river take it,
a paper boat jettisoned
on the far shore of regret.
How we communicate in this age
of artifice and intimacy
the lie that makes us
realize the truth.

Tech wars

Anyone have an old T-Mobile phone they're not using? Or an old iPhone (3Gs or newer)—I can unlock and use my T-mobile SIM in? Cellphone no longer holds a charge & the new pay-as-you-go model at Costco is primitive. New battery is nearly the price of a new phone. What's with that? It's a BATTERY fergawdsakes!!!

I'm reaching crisis point meltdown with my electronic gear all at once—and duct tape will not work. PPC iMac—code name: 'Ol Lazarus, Neil's Wind Tunnel G4—dead power supply (kaBOOM!); my main MacBook has one dead hard drive—tinkering with it now. 

Last summer's brownouts finally coming home to roost. Truth be told, I can't believe I kept these old  discarded Macs alive this long. The G4 I souped up for Neil was 1 GHz MDD (mirrored door drive—looks like a caddy grill on front) code name: Windtunnel, not one of the older models. So it was special—and fast. And it has SCSI ports—for my old Nikon film scanner. All this fuss over keeping old tech alive so I can scan some negatives. But with the G4, I think I have to call it quits. It went kabloom Literally.  It’s dead, Jim. Time to hit Craigslist.

I'm a feckin’ miracle worker at resurrecting old Macs, but when the power supply goes kabloom, and smoke issues forth! Not much I can do. Except to back off. So glad I was wearing glasses at the time.

Why my trusty MacBook also had to enter into the electronic fray of the obsolete and dead Mac pile at the same time with a failed hard drive, is a mystery. Bad timing, or that brownout is wreaking havoc. So now we really are Macless. And hard drives are now so shitty they don't even last 2 years—my second sucky Hitachi drive in 2 years—was under warranty first time around—is now toast. Solid state drives are more reliable. Wish they weren't so pricy.

I desperately need a working MacBook for the CPITS Symposium, and to take writing intensive with Camlle Dungy this weekend (I very nearly made my goal—fill the beds, and bring in 60 people for Saturday. Only 12 more to go...)

My emergency Craiglist find is a deranged headless MacBook Pro (no working screen, DVD drive, or internal sound, plus a dead battery—hey it was cheap—the previous owner must've learned skateboarding with it). But it fires up, and with a lot of coaxing, is serving as a motherboard hub—everything is peripheral! Think: e-octopus. It took some serious working, and a few miracles, not to mention, an external screen, keyboard, speakers and DVD drive, but I have a working Mac. Mopping up the software mess now. The MacBook Pro, though the same age as my MacBook, is infinitely faster. I was able to get some work done, and managed to fill the last of the beds for the CPITS conference.

Tech wars continued: Managed to get a tiny old hard drive working in my old MacBook 1.1—it fired right up, but updating it from 2008 is another issue. Still fussing and fighting with it hours later. I was able to upgrade from Tiger to Leopard, via an external DVD drive (the internal drive also went south)—but Snow Leopard just won't take. And Leopard is obsolete. Augh.

How did I ever function with a 60GB hard drive? Had to jettison most of my music and photos in order to upgrade. Poor ting sounds like a helicopter with the old hard drive. And it’s warmer than a hot tin cat on the lap too. Research on a solid state drive is in order. I need a new hard drive. At least I now have a clean system to clone! We'll eek another year of use out of you yet, Mr. MacBook 1.1!

To make matters worse, my cellphone fell off the wagon, it needs a long, cool ele-drinkypoo every 12 hours or it beeps piteously at me like an orphaned kitten. Then it chirps like a bird when it's well-fed. What happened, an electronic pulse? And it’s so old, I can’t find a battery for it. 

Just received an extraordinary care package from poet Kathleene K West in New Mexico—a very fancy T-Mobile phone and myriad tchatchkiis. Go raibh maith agat! All she wants is to be reimbursed for postage. Deal.

Still in computer purgatory... So I salvaged my old Macbook after the HDD died, with an old HDD from 2008—upgrading it was, well, pure hell. Do computers also have Mercury retrograde days? I managed to get it working again but, it's too old. All was swell until I OK'd the combo update (on both MBs). What was I thinking? I couldn’t leave well enough alone, now, could I? I had to go and update both MacBooks and now I have to MacBricks.

I think our DSL is so slow, the software was corrupted as it happened TWICE. Due to a series of flukes (MBP install disk was in DVD), I was able to save the old MacBook—and install Snow Leopard—probably b/c the combo update stall had thrashed Leopard, that it had to load. Never could get it to work before. So I'm half-way there. But the MacBook Pro is another story. In geek purgatory. But I really need an intel core duo 2 Mac (that #2 is important!) to access the iCloud. At least I was able to save my Apple email account with the now daid MacBookPro (MBP). Well, I’m still Mackless on all fronts. I’m afraid that MacBook resurrection 2.0 is on hiatus until after the conference.

Note Bene: I bought a portable external hard drive at Costco and managed to run the ailing Macbook off the external drive, then update the combo OS update at IONs Institute, as they had faster WiFi. Thinking outside the boxes’ box is exhausting. But, success! Now to remedy that MacBook Pro still stuck in limbolandia when I return. Having the combo update on the external drive saved my bacon. Let the clone wars commence.

BOOKENDS

I had a poetry teacher 

who shored up his old bed 

with the books of rival poets. 

He used library copies 

to prop up the missing leg

so no one else could read them. 

His ex-wife’s book, 

among the fallen.

All this was revealed

when he was carted off

to the funny farm, mid-semester.

Funny that we were discussing 

a photo of an enraged Ezra Pound 

crouched in a cage

at the time.

8/31/2012

added, rev. 8/21

Bill Truesdale

If it wasn't for Bill Truesdale's constant encouragement, I would've never thought of my zany email letter to him as a possible prose piece for House on Via Gombito: North American Women Writing Abroad (A broad!). (I had just returned from the USSR; I was abuzz, agog, as well as jet-lagged.)

Bill rejected my Peru travel piece and said—work on the letter. My flabber was ghasted. My shell was shocked. What letter? My email? So, from my emails, I drafted a train piece about traveling across the Russias. First big prose piece I'd ever tackled. Something like 10k words, it went through many drafts, and it also opened up the doorway to writing prose. And here I am, right now, writing prose....

Bill believed strongly in supporting emerging writers, and founded New Rivers Press in an old barn in 1968; Bill picked up lead poisoning from setting type as he set the first books by hand. The legacy press, with some 300 titles in print, is oldest continuously publishing press in the country. It was also the first book publisher to obtain a 501(c)3 nonprofit status, thus changing the role of small publishing forever.

So, yeah, I Bill, New Rivers Press editor extraordinaire. Bill died in 2001, after a long illness. Wherever you may be, Bill, riding that great zephyr in the sky, thanks for reading my zany eleventh-hour emails and seeing a potential story in them.

Nearly fifty women writers from North America contributed to the House on Via Gombito, an extraordinary anthology, published in 1991, long before the likes of Cheryl Strayed, Elizabeth Gilbert, and other women traveller-writers came into the limelight. These women writers (and myself) were pioneers exploring the inner emotional landscape of travel, as well as the outer landscapes, in a genre stolidly set in a male-dominated world of heroic adventure writing.

My memoir about traveling across the USSR, Night Train to Moscow: Waging Peace was reprinted in Writing the Rails: Train Adventures by the World's Best Loved Train Stories—by a subsidiary of Workman Publishers, Black Dog & Leventhal. It was a great line up (of mostly dead writers), Paul Theroux, VS Naipaul, Edith Wharton... I kept thinking they'd made a mistake including me.

Sadly the book was stood up and remaindered after 9/11. I never did get to do an author reading or book signing at Barnes & Noble. Alas, I do not have an electronic facsimile of my story, it's on the ever-growing 'to do" scan pile. It's done! Visit the page, Writing the Rails: Train Adventures.

C.W. "Bill" Truesdale

Maureen Hurley teaching silkpainting at Pleasanton

Maureen Hurley teaching silkpainting with Living History at the 2011 San Francisco Caledonian Club Scottish Highland Games. See you in the barn at the Alameda Fairgrounds in Pleasanton this Labor Day weekend! Tickets are $12 at the gate. KIds get in free.

Migraine cure

OMG! I've  found a fantastic cure for migraines—lemon curd tart smothered in fresh raspberries. Be sure to really push the berries into the curd for best results.

Fan o' the Week

CPITS Poetry & Writing Symposium

California Poets in the Schools

Passing the Gift Forward

A Poetry and Writing Symposium

September 14 - 16, 2012 Institute of Noetic Sciences Petaluma, California

A Maxfield Parrish sunset like no other

Did anyone catch the sunset tonight? My weenie flip cellphone (with serious technical issues) decided it wasn't gonna turn on, no matter what. So, sadly, no photo. I took mental pictures. What an incredible silhouette of Mt. Tam and the Bay replete with clouds that were etched straight out of a Maxfield Parrish painting. Weirdly there was also a hint of rain in the air—so we also had angel wings and buttermilk clouds lit from behind, glowing in shades of alizarin and woad. I raced home to get my cameras but I was too late. The sky had turned to dull pewter.

Susan Wooldridge said that were beams of light streaking out from "bimulous" clouds—it looked like a William Blake! Nothing like a little display of Godlight refracting through a sieve of clouds. Or smoke. So do ya think all that Chevron pollution is a contributing factor to that glorious sunset? It surely set the imagination afire. Jack Glider managed to get a photo from San Francisco but his fine photo was nowhere near as intense as what I witnessed.

Nice photo Jack Gilder! Did you snap any others? 

Tonight, I'll be at the ready

with my camera in hand. 

But no sunset was ever as grand

as last night's cloud confetti.

from a FB post, somewhat revised. Added 8/19

Hedgehogs

When my grannie was a child in Ireland, she told me how she spent hours playing with wild hedgehogs in the hedgerows dividing the fields. I imagined her crawling into tangled briar hedges to rescue them from themselves as they snoozed snug as dormice in their little dens. So I've always been intrigued by them.

In Scotland, they say it's bad luck to encounter a hedgehog, or, as they call it, a furzepig, on any road, high or low, after dark. But hedgehogs only come out at dusk. Does that mean hedgehogs are bad luck no matter what? Or is it strictly an off-road love affair?

Someone, most likely an Englishman visiting his summer holiday croft, ferried hedgehogs in a handbag to the Hebrides in 1974—ostensibly to control the snails and slugs in his garden. Things got out of hand. Hedgehogs now outnumber Uist island residents 2:1.

Hedgehogs, whose only living relatives are umpossom-ably ugly Borneo moonrats, share a distant ancestry to shrews. They are voracious as pigs and rats, and have no natural enemies. And that spells bad luck for shore birds and other ground-nesting birds, including the corncrake, as they are endangered due to the groundhog's lustful appetites. According to hedgehogs—escargot is overrated. They prefer their eggs raw.

I once heard corncrakes gather at dusk in the hedges of Iona singing like electric fences. Uist now exports more non-native hedgehogs than sheep to the Scottish mainland. So much for the corncrakes. There are only so many ways you can prepare a shepherd pie of hedgehog and wild haggis. The Hebrides hogs are routinely airlifted to Ayrshire. WWRB say? Tae A Hedgehoglet? Not exactly a sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie for a' tha.

Meanwhile, washerwoman Mrs Tiggy-Winkle's relatives have their own rather mundane holiday hovel hidaway replete with tiny clothespegs in Beatrix Potter's garden in Dunkeld near Birnam Wood, not the Lake District, as was previously reported. I bet you didn't even know Peter Rabbit was as Scottish as Macbeth. Och, but that's an old Entish tale that's still waiting to be told.

Hedgehog by Luke Clennell 1815

All 17 species of hedgehogs worldwide are named after Ireland—Erin, not Scotland or England.

Order:	Erinaceomorpha
Family:	Erinaceidae
Subfamily:	Erinaceinae

Meanwhile in merry olde England, hedgehogs really are an endangered species. Go figure. They have had a long run (er, waddle) of very bad luck crossing the roads ever since Henry Ford got inventive. The cars win every time. Cars: plus 100%. Hedgehogs minus 75%.

Besides, hedgehogs rather look like little scullery brushes scooting across the road. The chickens have a much better track record. They have wings. I don't think we're ready for the idea of winged hedgehogs. So now there are little hedgehog tunnels to help them cross the road to get to the other side. (Don't go toward the light!)

In England, there are hedgehog hospitals for the hedgehog survivors (and the occasional bad-temperred badger) who've had run-ins with lawnmowers and such—St. Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital being the busiest in the world. (Ya can't make this stuff up!)

Hedgehog is from Middle English heyg-hoge, via a circuitous street Latin hericion-em, via the Greek kher, meaning yrchon, or, urchin. An yrchon hab a litel body and many pikes and prikkes. The young are called hoglets. Really.

Since hedgehog was a preferred delicacy of the medieval riche, Chaucer probably ate hedgehog in cameline sauce—whatever that is. The camel part worries me. Some recipes from the Middle Ages called for hedgehog meat puddings studded with slivered almonds. This is how we know what they were called.

Putte hem in a Spete as men don piggys; take a litel prycke, & prykke þe yrchons, an putte in þe holes þe Almaundys….

 (Sounds suspiciously like a haggis recipe.)

According to The People's Cookbook, roasted hedgehog on a spit was an ancient Briton favorite dating back some 8,000 years. Apparently "the meat of a hedgehog is good for lepers" and is also a guaranteed pissy diuretic. Think asparagus.

The English have been coining similes and false syllogisms of man (and knights) with hedgehogs dating back to Anglo-Saxon era. 

Made him with arwis (arrows) ot ther malis most wikke Rassemble an yrchon (hedgehog) fulfilled with spynys thikke. 

They also thought hedgehogs stole apples by rolling home with them in tandem like dunghill beetles. Or that the crafty buggers snuck up on dozing cows to steal milk straight from the teat while they y-slept unawares. Talk about spilt milk.

They say the gypsies still bake them in clay (to remove the spines). They stole children too—especially those street urchins. The gypsies, not the hedgehogs—nor the lepers.

*      *      *
During the summer of 1989, I was walking the tree-lined backstreets of Cherkassy with a new Soviet friend. As we strolled along the banks of the Dnipr River one sultry evening, we unfolded the good linen stories of our lives—and a hedgehog snuffled across our path. I scooped it up as it tried to waddle away.

Oleg said NO! It was bad luck to pick a hedgehog up, they were "quite disgusting." The same way he spoke of the street tziganii (gypsies). But I wanted to see one up close. 

The hedgehog grunted and snuffled like a little pig and tried to curl into a kootchie ball but he was far too fat. He gave up and stared at me with beady eyes—completely unafraid. Snorfling asthmatically all the while. We eyed each other in the gloaming. The fat hedgehog and I.

It was then my Soviet friend said, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." He told me that hedgehogs could predict the weather. We were in the midst of the great Soviet Thaw. That was pretty big. He said it was an old Ukrainian custom to entice hedgehogs into the garden with saucers of milk, who repay them by eating garden snails and pests.

Alas, the hedgehog had critters of his own nesting between his spines (the hedgehog, not my friend) so I was not willing to hold him for very long for fear of fleas and ticks and lice.

Eventually our luck ran out. Sometimes that is the way of the heart crossing the road late at night. No one to blame but the weather.

*      *      *
When my grandmother was staring death in the eye, she complained of hedgehogs loose in the living room again.

We put out saucers of milk, just in case.



See Hedgehog Tale Index

Used with kind permission from Alastair Johnston Hedgehog by Luke Clennell is not technically public domain: since i uploaded it, it's in MY domain, but you may link to it, Mo, here's the first page of hedgehog text, it's from Recreations in Natural History, 1815.

On Lugh and Leprechauns

Celtic deity  Lugus^[1]

My grannie once told me that if you were clever and quiet enough to sneak up and catch that little leprechaun who hides his pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, while he was busy at work, most likely he'd be smoking his pipe and cobbling a brogue, or a shoe.

Then, if you caught him, you got three wishes. But don't let go, don't take your eyes off him for one instant—or poof! He'll be gone in a blinding flash. And don't take any coinage he offers. It'll turn to stone at first light.

OK, so for years I thought little old Mr. Berini, the Italian cobbler who lived down the road, was a leprechaun. I'd sneak up on him but he was merely busy cobbling our shoes in his basement, nothing more.

But he only charged my grannie a quarter for resoling our shoes. In hindsight, she was probably just trying to get me to go away or be quiet. Mr. Berini must've thought I was a peculiarly "touched" child, I'm sure.

Some scholars think the origin of the diminutive Irish leprechaun was an offshoot of the bigger-than-life Celtic god of all crafts, the Irish Lugh Lámhfhada (Lew of the long arm), or his cognates, Welsh Ludd, or Lleu Llaw Gyffes, (Lew of the Skillful Hand), and the Gaulish triune god, Lugus. (The Romans equated Lugos/Lugus with Mercury).

Votive inscription to Lugus. Lugo,Galicia.

The great god Lugh (whose –Proto-Celtic moniker,*Lug-" is embedded in dozens of European cities—from London, to Leiden, to Laon), was erroneously referred to as the shining one, or a sun god before the advancement of Proto Indo-European linguistics proved it to be a false cognate.

Though Lugh was the maker of shoes, and master of all crafts, his name is not related to the Proto Indo-European leuk, and the later Latinate cognate, luz, or light—besides there already is a minor Gaulish Celtic lightning god Leucetios‚ whose name does stem from leuk. And we don't want to invoke lightning and rain. 

You're probably wondering why I've gone off the deep end writing about leprechauns during high summer. Other than it's nearly half way to St. Patrick's Day, I was responding to a Facebook post by Celtic Mythology, August, Lúghnasadh, is Lugh's month. The harvest month approacheth. Besides, our summer months, dubbed Junuary and now, apparently, Julyuary, have been socked in with thick fog and drizzle. What sun?

In Irish mythology, the Lughnasadh festival is said to have been begun by the god Lugh (modern spelling: Lú) as a funeral feast and sporting competition in commemoration of his foster-mother, Tailtiu, who died of exhaustion after clearing the plains of Ireland for agriculture. —Wiki

Lughnasadh, the night of the wicker man,
the burning man set aflame
Full moon marks the first harvest
The plain ripens, bellydeep in bright grain.

Some scholars think that the leprechaun is not a vestige of the pre-Christian Celtic pantheon at all.

Others say he was an invention of the Irish Tourist Board. I think he was a hangover invention of the Saint Patrick's Day Parade.

Clearly when Lugh got snared in the web of medieval hagiography in Christian Ireland, he got the roughshod Cinderella treatment and was subsequently shrunk like a wool sock in the hot water laundry cycle.

The leprechaun is supposed to be a singular entity (no plural hoardes or tribelets—that too seems to be a Disney-meets-Bord Failte Eireann shenanighan—courtesy of Darby O'Gill and the Little People).

According to the Facebook site, Celtic Mythology, “The Lore of Ireland: An Encyclopedia of Myth legend and Romance”, renowned folklore collector and native Gaelic speaker and poet, the late professor, Dathi Ó hÓgáin, stated that "the designation luchorpán was only invented in Ireland when the lore of dwarf communities was adopted from abroad by Irish writers and that the solitary leprechaun of folklore is a post-medieval development from the literature." (Collins Press, Cork, 2006; pp. 308-9).

University College Dublin Professor Dathi Ó hÓgáin's post-medieval claim is interesting in that luchorpán is clearly not a native Goidelic Irish word. Not with that "p" in it. There is no "p" in Goidelic. The Irish were positively allergic to plosives. This is how you can spot loan words in Irish, like páiste (from the word, page, or child, not the cymbals!) Or Welsh—map; Irish cognate—mac (son).

But I don't think it's quite that simple, as the term is indeed used in Old Irish texts.

A quick internet search reveals that the earliest version of "luchorpán" (a water sprite) was used in the 8th century in "Echtra Fergusa maic Léti". But it's a far stretch of the imagination—let alone, linguistics, as luchorpán mixes Church Latin with Irish—to be a native irish word.The Old Irish, lúchorpán is a hybrid word— lú means “small” and corp means “body.”

But Lú, or Lugh, also means the really BIG baddass god dude. What's a neopagan to do to keep the Cailleachan ("Storm Hags") at bay? The leprechaun's abode seems to be a curious conspiracy of sunlight and rain.

Of course, the watery luchorpán might have been a different entity altogether that was later conflated with Lugh and the leprechaun. Still, there's that pesky "p" to contend with.... And we know that those sooty godlets, the leprechauns, who live in caves, or wood huts deep in the woods, are not particularly fond of water, other than their Swiss bank vaults at the ends of rainbows.

The page from the Free Dictionary has some interesting information that seems plausible.

Leprechaun  n. One of a race of elves in Irish folklore who can reveal hidden treasure to those who catch them.

[Irish Gaelic luprachán, alteration of Middle Irish luchrupán, from Old Irish luchorpán : luchorp (lú-, small; see legwh-in Indo-European roots + corp, body from Latin corpus; seekwrep- in Indo-European roots) + -án, diminutive suff.]
lepre·chaunish adj.

Word History: Nothing seems more Irish than the leprechaun; yet hiding within the word leprechaun is a word from another language entirely. If we look back beyond Modern Irish Gaelic luprachán and Middle Irish luchrupán to Old Irish luchorpán, we can see the connection. Luchorpán is a compound of Old Irish lú, meaning "small," and the Old Irish word corp, "body." Corp is borrowed from Latin corpus (which we know from habeas corpus). Here is a piece of evidence attesting to the deep influence of Church Latin on the Irish language. Although the word is old in Irish it is fairly new in English, being first recorded in 1604.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

and

leprechaun [ˈlɛprəˌkɔːn]

n (Myth & Legend / European Myth & Legend) (in Irish folklore) a mischievous elf, often believed to have a treasure hoard

[from Irish Gaelic leipreachān, from Middle Irish lūchorpān, fromlū small + corp body, from Latin corpus body]

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003


See also: How Lleu Llaw Gyffes Got his Name

Another Lugh link from Celtic Mythology with some interesting Indo-European connections.

HEDGEHOG: NOTES ON DEATH

HEDGEHOG: NOTES ON DEATH

In the Ukraine, old people set out
saucers of milk for the hedegehogs
who repay them by eating garden bugs.
They say they do it because 
the hedgehogs bring them good luck.

In Great Britain and the Isle of Man
hedgehogs have achieved royal status.
There are hedgehog road crossings 
and tiny hedgehog hospitals 
for wounded Tiddilywinkles. 

When she was a child in Ireland, 
my grandmother loved to play with them.
She dragged them like puppies
around the farm of Coomb an Or.

When my grandmother lay close to dying, 
she complained of hedgehogs
loose in the living room—again.
With that, I wondered if dying 
was a bit like child's play.

7/22/12

Alexander Cockburn, Dead and Alive

When I worked for the West Sonoma County Paper (aka The Paper, The Independent, then The North Bay Bohemian) we knew Alex Cockburn because he wrote for a sister newspaper, The Anderson Valley Advertiser, and he'd often send us missives (and books) that kept us up late at night changing our headlines on more than one occasion.

Cockburn wrote for both radical and conservative newspapers and magazines—from the Wall Street Journal to The Village Voice. He penned a controversial column for The Nation, called "Beat the Devil." And so he did. With a stick. Nothing was sacrosanct. His newsletter, CounterPunch sucker-punched greasy politicians right and left. Alex was a bit of a Schrödinger's cat, he could argue both sides of the quantum superposition paradox and come out smiling. 

I first met Alex when the Russians began coming to the North Bay—we had a grand Irish confab in the middle of all that splendid Soviet defection at a Booneville winery. I was covering Soviet artists for The Paper. Did I have the presence of mind to photograph Alex? Not sure. I think not. And now he's gone. There's a hole in the universe where he used to be. I don't have the heart to write an obituary. So this will have to do. Goodbye old man. Like Lenin said, "Be as radical as reality."  I know you will take those pearly gates by storm.

July 21, 2012 

added and expanded 7/24/16

first draft

When I worked for the Western Sonoma County Paper (aka Independent/NB Bohemian) we knew Alex because he wrote for a sister newspaper, Anderson Valley Advertiser, and he'd often send us missives (and books) that kept us up late at night–changing our headlines on more than one occasion. I met him when the Russians began coming to North Bay—did I have the presence of mind to photograph him? Not sure.

OLD MAGYAR WOMAN

"A madjar nyelv már vesz el. Mi örögek vadjunk még, beszélünk madjarul, de az éfijúság, ezek a tinerek, ezek nem. A zién lejányom még beszél, de ja ziszkólába sak oláhul tanult, nem madjarul. De tud madjarul jól. Az onkáim isz tudnak madjarul, de nem ura fórdjiccák vissza."       —Fotó: Ádám Gyula

—from a photo by Gyula Ádám

A Csángó Magyar woman sits
in a windowed alcove stained
the color of a forgotten summer sky.
Her mind is lost in the crenulated folds
of memory and the wars, and those who left,
but her hands still know the path
to the freshly baked cornbread
moist and warm from the kemence.
Crumbs cling to the lip of the knife like a lover.
The cat speaks and weaves an intricate knot
between the staves of a 3-legged stool
that was once a wagon wheel
straddling the ruts on a dirt road,
now planted in the barren clay floor,
as the photographer records
the death rattle of an old way of life
threatened by time and culture.
She is dressed in maroon and black.
At her age, mourning is a permanent state of being.
She wears new running shoes,
the only concession to this age.
But even Nikes will not carry her to victory.
Her sad eyes that witnessed the atrocities
of war and the devastation of her culture,
can no longer see the lacy intricacies of light
and shadow playing on the oblique walls,
billowing like stormclouds on the horizon.
The limed stucco ceiling, stained
a robin's-egg-blue to ward off the evil eye,
sloughed off in the shape of a sacred heart
to reveal the the ribs of old wood and reed.
Clouded eyes that witnessed myriad winters,
are the secret color of bauchy ice.
She can no longer see the small stitches
her skilled fingers once embroidered
on the fine tapestries covering the wall,
enscribed in a fractal language of flower & field.
The meaning of the ancient patterns—
a mother tongue translated in gutteral runes
drawn in crimson and woad, a dying language
forgotten by the modern world,
only whispered in the funereal corners
of the past.

7/18/12

Mad, Mad World

A frail wisp of a little old lady, dressed in flowing vague floral patterns of beige and white, wearing a lacy wide-brimmed hat, toddled up to the cheese booth where I was serving samples.

She looked vaguely familiar, and her eyes reminded me of an older version of my mom—if my mom was still alive. She was my mother's age. I searched her face for some clue. At first I thought she was a cancer survivor, because of her sunken eyes but she still had her hair, and she looked sane enough.

I puzzled over her face. I tend to remember the faces of people I photographed, sometimes decades later. But I couldn't quite place her.

But she wanted me to take her trash after I'd offered her a sample and I refused, not wanting to cross-contaminate the food... I was taken aback that that she had even handed me her trash with such an imperious gesture. An awkward moment ensued as I withdrew my hand  and pointed to the trash can. Inexplicably I was thinking of musicals—the scene between the Jets and the Sharks. Snap! Dancing in the aisles.

The little old lady, also taken aback, said she liked the cheese, and wanted two pieces. She said that she was having some people over tonight.  Did I have a larger piece? Thankful for the distraction, I gathered my wits as I rummaged in the box behind the counter for a large chunk, and offered it to her.

Meanwhile, another woman came up and was thanking her for something, I didn't know what, so I asked what that was about? She said: I really like her work. What work? Her movies. Movies? Don't you know who that is? That's Rita Moreno! She lives in the Oakland Hills. 

Oh. I was gobsmacked. No. I guess I didn't know that.

But indeed I was thinking of my mother's halcyon stage days when I thought the old woman reminded me of my mom.

I remember watching my mom at the Sausalito Gate Playhouse, performing Of Thee I Sing, and Pipedream. At Music Circus costuming Guys and Dolls. I remember searching for my mom in the big crowd scene in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World. But I never found her. No matter how hard I tried. By that time she was already well on her way to the world of madness.

When I got my break, I went looking for Ms. Moreno in the store aisles. I wanted to apologize—well not so much to apologize so much as to smooth some feathers and to close the loop.

I wanted also to tell Rita that I knew of her world, and that my mother's escape came too late. But Rita was already gone. Deep into the Oakland Hills. An escaped West Side Story.

Snap!

ENVOI
Dec 3: I was chit-chatting tonight with Rita Moreno as I was putting away my cheese booth. We nibbled on dill havarti with salmon. I gave her suggestions for appetizers, etc., for a party.

I've become the Go To girl for spontaneous recipes and menus. This time she didn't try to hand me her trash. She must've remembered how I got cranky last summer.

Anyway, she does have the most marvellous eyes. So frail, yet so alive. Most people I work with don't even know who she is. Sad, Really.

At least they've heard of West Side Story.


Dec. 23 Wished Rita a Merry Christmas—we chatted in Spanglish. Sweet.

Dec. 30 Rita came right up to me to say hello. I met her friend
—we slid through several languages as he doesn't speak English. Fun. I told Rita about learning Russian while traveling there as an artist and poet. She looks so much better—I think she was sick.  She said she was feeling much better. Anyway, it's fun conversing with her. I think she enjoys the one-on-one, with no mention of her stardom.

Jan. 21 Rita came over to say hello—she's looking positively marvelous. I told her so.

I asked her if she would be restaging her one-woman show. All my friends are still talking about it and I never never got a chance to see it. She said, "I don't know, it depends upon how I feel."

She said that she's recovering from double hip surgery and it's been a long haul. She said, "I'll be sure to let you know if I do decide to stage it again." Looking forward to it.

A newer blog entry on Rita, Maybe Even Dance Again.